Conference Summary Evaluation
“It was a wonderful, creative and stimulating day. I am looking forward to working with my Norfolk County Council colleague to: collaborate, join up and enjoy our work on inclusion and sustainability. Thank you”. (Conference delegate)
“It was very a interesting conference raising issues that seem to offer a very realistic alternative and up to date”. (Conference delegate)
“A very useful day, especially hearing about different experiences with the Index and the workshops to ‘practice’ using the new version. Barbara Brokamp’s presentation was extremely useful, as was Judith Carter’s… It was useful to have presentations from SENCOs on what actually happened in their schools”. (Conference delegate)
Delegates came from a variety of fields but largely comprised of education practitioners with some representatives from organisations promoting non violence and equality. Amongst the latter these largely comprised of organisations with a focus on disability and LGBT issues. Education practitioners included post graduate students, teachers, lecturers, consultants, research fellows, PGCE teachers, SENCOs, Principle Consultants, Professors, Inclusion Heads from Local Authorities, Educations Advisors with NGOs, teaching union representatives and learning coordinators.
Delegates were greeted with a looped presentation of images and questions to stimulate their thoughts, along side refreshments and delegate packs. After initial introductions by Professor Roger Slee (Institute of Education) and Dr Em Williams (CSIE), Professor Tony Booth began the day talking about the revised Index and the thinking that has led to this in a talk entitled “A singular approach to developing education for a sustainable planet”. This was followed by a short break and then examples of the Index in use in a range of countries. Speakers were Professor Kari Nes from Norway’s Hedmark University College, Barbara Borkamp from Germany’s Montag Foundation for Youth and Society, Judith Carter, Senior Advisor and Inclusion Lead SEND, Norfolk County Children’s Services. Professor Nes’s presentation focused on the adaptation’s that have been made surrounding the Index in order to use it within Norway and she spent a lot of time unpicking the theoretical differences between a British and a Norwegian understanding of terms such as didactic and ‘bildung’ within her talk “Linking European traditions for developing curricula”. Ms Brokamp explained how the Index is used within Germany and emphasised the importance of the indicators and questions in her talk “Working with Schools and communities”. Ms. Carter spoke about the pilot project that she has been running across Norfolk on the revised third edition of the Index and introduced two colleagues, Cassie Beckett form Royden Primary School and Mike Colk from Heartease Primary School who have participated in the process. Each shared their own experiences of the Index process.
Lunch provided ample opportunity to network and mingle and the catering was widely praised, including the fact that bananas were fair-trade. Lunch was followed by an interactive/participatory session held by Mary Young from EDJI training entitled “Developing global citizenship through education” where she sought to turn conventional, oppressive thinking practices on their head drawing upon the Index as a supportive resource in this process. A space was left at the end of all presentations for questions and answers and these were widely used.
Afternoon workshop sessions were held in a range of break out spaces on the following areas: Global citizenship and democratic education (facilitated by Mary Young, Mike Yule and Barbara Brokamp); Responsiveness to gender and health promoting schools (facilitated by Em Williams); Values and rights based education and non-violent education (facilitated by Judith Carter and Sulochini Pather); Education for sustainability and transforming curricula (facilitated by Tony Booth and Kari Nes). The last two sessions detailed above proved to be especially popular. Representatives from each workshop fed briefly into the plenary session that immediately followed, while delegates were given a further chance to ask speakers any questions not already addressed.
